Final revision phase

So The Novel Formerly Titled Mindfire is now in its final revision phase. My lovely and brilliant wife read through it over the last couple of days and provided many insightful comments about things that dropped her out of the story, didn't make sense, or just plain didn't work. I've got some time off from my day job coming up, so I'll be rampaging through the novel fixing up all those things that need to be improved. Then it's one more quick pass to check for any obvious last-minute mistakes (typos, etc.) and I'm done.

I still need to get cover art made, and maps; figure out whether I want to go through Smashwords to publish it to all the various platforms or just start with doing it myself on Amazon; start marketing it (conveniently, Google just sent me one of their periodic "Here's $100 in free Adwords placements" cards. Honestly, I'll feel lucky if that results in one or two sales); send out free copies to a few deserving folks; promote it here; yadda yadda.

This is the culmination of almost a year's work. I've learned a huge amount along the way, and the most terrifying thing is that this is just the first time I'm going to go through it. I plan to keep doing this for the rest of my life. Godzilla willing, it'll get easier down the road.

Avengers, Dissemble

So The Avengers was amazingly entertaining, and now I am extremely pessimistic about my own skills. Joss Whedon probably sneezes, and the droplets form hilarious snarky one-liners on whatever nearby glass surfaces there are, which he probably has a lot of in his fancy Hollywood Hills home because he's a famous talented millionaire.

So I'm not bitter or anything; really, I'm not, because why would I be? Joss was writing much earlier in his life than I started, and he came from a long line of screenwriters. It's just a whole big-ass family of creative professionals. I keep reminding myself that I just have to keep doing it, and eventually I'll succeed. Or I won't. I can't succeed if I don't try; I don't want to be on my deathbed regretting that I never tried, even if I don't succeed.

I just finished the third draft. I need to rewrite the epilogue, and then there's still work to do; I've identified a number of things about the novel that need to be fixed. Mostly it's cosmetic clean-up; some characters need to be more sharply defined, some backstory needs to be elaborated upon (only slightly, I promise), certain things need to be amped up to make them more fantastical.

I'm also changing the title of the novel, back to the original title, which I alas am not going to share yet. Mindfire is neat and all but there's been a couple of fantasy novels released on Amazon lately using it, and I don't want to cause confusion. I already searched; virtually nothing is using the new (old) title. Mindfire will be the subtitle, or rather, the series name. The novel is book 1 of Mindfire.

Okay, here's a hint: the title is The _____ of ______. Can you guess? If so, please send me stock picks and lottery numbers.

Professional Crastinating

Is it possible to put off procrastinating until later? As much as I procrastinate, you'd think I'd have figured out how.

I'm a terrible procrastinator, particularly about household finances—taxes, filing paperwork, bills. I do all the easy stuff first and leave all the difficult stuff until later. Pretty typical, right?

But I've noticed that when I do manage to make myself do the difficult stuff, it's never as difficult as I thought it was going to be. So there's really just this initial hump to get over. This same hump gets in my way whenever my wife suggests we do something like go for a walk, or take the kids to the park. I really don't wanna! but then I get out of my chair and get on my shoes and once I'm outside, it's not so bad.

I'm not going to try to analyze the underlying reasons why I'm like this; I'm sure there are some such reasons, but I think it's much more productive to look at the thought processes that occur while I'm procrastinating. There's a lot of internal debates that happen, and if I could figure out how to have the right side win those debates, maybe I'd get more done.

Mostly what I want to do, when I'm at home, is write. So let's say it's just after dinner. I sit down at my computer, and the kids are still awake, and I know that if I start writing I might get interrupted, which is death for productivity. Still, writing in five-minute snatches here and there is still better than not writing at all.

But before I can even open LibreOffice, I see the pile of dead trees on my desk: the aforementioned paperwork and bills. And I think, "I want to write, but I need to go through this paperwork. But I won't want to go through the paperwork. So I'm not going to. But I certainly can't do something I want when there's something that I need to do." And the upshot is, I end up doing neither of them. Instead, I sit there switching back and forth between Facebook and my RSS feeds on Google Reader, even when there hasn't been anything new in the last ten minutes.

Sometimes I even put off things I like doing, because it requires a mental context switch to reload the state—that is, get back to where I was. Writing a novel is awful for this, because there's almost a year of work there. Granted, it's not like I have to remember everything every time I open up a chapter, but it's still a hurdle to get over. Once I actually start the writing, then it's a breeze... but the hurdle's always in the way.

No Rules

There are no rules in writing. There are only statistically relevant guidelines.

Writing is entirely subjective; there is no absolute good and bad, no absolute right or wrong, no absolute "you must do it this way." No matter how you choose to write, you can always find someone who will like it (within reason; 200,000 misspelled words in a row will probably not find any takers). And if your goal is only to make one person happy, then what does it matter whether you follow some arbitrary "rules"?

But most of us have bigger goals: We want to make enough money writing that it can be our career, and in order for that to happen, enough people have to like what we write. The more people you want to please with your writing, the more statistically significant those guidelines become. Most readers expect certain things, to wit:

You really can't violate standard spelling. Despite the fact that English has no central defining authority, spelling has become almost entirely standardized, with only minor regional dialects.

Grammar is a little less fixed, as there are a number of edge cases where you can bend the rules without any significant number of people perceiving it as a mistake, but generally, you've got to stick with fairly standard grammar or you're going to confuse your readers.

Things get fuzzier as you get into plotting, pacing, characterization, character development, descriptive style, and all the other elements of the actual storytelling. There's a lot of flexibility in how you can do these things, because there are a lot of different readers out there who will tolerate variance. There are individual readers who will tolerate slow pacing and fast pacing, but maybe not in the same book, or simply not at the same time—Joe Reader might well be up for a fast-paced detective story today, but next week maybe he wants something a little more laid-back and reflective. A single book can't please both those aspects of Joe Reader's personality at the same time.

Rules about how to write are legion. Here's one which includes rules by (among other well-known authors) Elmore Leonard. Dare you, Jane Unpublished Author, think you know better than the great Elmore Leonard? The problem is that some of Leonard's rules are violated willy-nilly by other famous best-selling authors. Does that mean Leonard's rules are bullshit?

No; it means they're guidelines. All things considered, following Leonard's rules will probably produce prose prone to popularity... but not always. (And to some degree, his rules are stylistic choices. "Never use a verb other than 'said' to carry dialogue," he says. It's trivial to find bestsellers (and critically acclaimed novels) that violate that rule. Maybe he's just trying to reduce the incidence of using verbs other than "said," knowing that eliminating other speech verbs is impossible.)

Pick your goal. Figure out what guidelines you need to follow to meet that goal. Then get your ass in the chair and write, write, write. You don't always win when destiny rolls the dice, but the more times she rolls, the more chances you have to win.

The End Is Nigh

So I had a really painful minor epiphany the other day, when I realized that my ending sucks and I need to redo it. From scratch. Yeah. A lot of work went into the current ending, but unfortunately the whole thing was predicated on something that wasn't true: Turns out, people like happy endings, as long as there's some pain along the way. The old ending was a goddamn disaster, for both the protagonists and for me.

Simple, safe happy endings are fine for a particular group of people (children), but I am (hopefully) not writing for children. On the other hand, not everything has to be a brutal catastrophe like Game of Thrones, which, although popular, is statistically speaking an anomaly. The good guys usually should win in the end, even if they get pretty beat-up along the way. Why did I think I could successfully go rogue my first time out?

A lot of writers—particularly new writers—try to go way overboard in their first works. A new, untested chef wouldn't think that he has the skills to make a nine-course French-Mongolian-Hualapi fusion dinner and get it perfectly right the first time, but someone writing their first novel thinks, "Hey, I can string words together in a way that doesn't make people's eyeballs bleed. Therefore, I can write a five-novel series that not only will dispense with traditional story structure, it will have nine separate protagonists alternating between first- and third-person POV chapters, and all the characters will die halfway through book one!"

This pervasive delusion is partially reinforced by the occasional first-time writer who does manage to pull off something ridiculously complex. Then he gets famous, and then other writers say, "Well damn, if Bob Peckermeyer can do it his first time out, why can't I?"

No. Flukes happen, but depending on them is madness. Most people take years to get good at a discipline—that's why they call it a discipline—and you're better served by starting out simple. Write a straightforward story with one protagonist, one major villain, some supporting characters, and a setting that is not an utterly radical invention. Master the basics; then you can ignore the rules and start doing wacky things.

Deity Reflex

I was walking home from the gym a few minutes ago. It's open until midnight on weeknights, which is convenient; the kids are in bed, the wife's ensconced with Bejeweled, tonight's leftovers are put away, and I can squeeze in a workout without anyone bothering me for anything.

On the way home, I looked up at the spring stars, and, as happens to me from time to time, I was briefly taken in by the endless infinity of the universe. I thought about how cool it would be to be able to see the ecliptic projected on the sky, as if the world were my own personal Celestia—or better yet, if I just had bionic eyeballs that could superimpose whatever I wanted on the world.

That thought led to a kernel of an idea for a story, about a future civilization that has mastered biological engineering and where everyone who wants them has bionic eyes, so that they can gaze upon the wonders of the universe with all sorts of informative overlays and HUD elements—and, hell, Wikipedia—at their disposal. And then I thought, what if that was their religion?

The universe is vast, so vast that we simply can't comprehend it. We have to use terms like light-year, of which just one is already unimaginably larger than anything we can comprehend. (A little under 6 trillion miles. And you thought it was far to Pomona.) And then we talk about billions of them.

The human brain is capable of feeling connected to all that, even if we can't rationally contain it inside our—admittedly amazing—brains. Not everyone feels that connectedness in the same way; those who have been taught to be Christians feel it as the presence of their deity, Jehovah. Muslims call it Allah. We interpret that deity reflex by whatever cultural framework has been imprinted upon us.

That reflex is a double-edged sword. We feel an unimaginably pure sense of belonging and comfort when that reflex is engaged; it's unfettered emotion, and the lure of that feeling cannot be denied. But reason and rationality are what brought us out of the darkness. Is there room for both of them in this world?

I don't want to be too definitive here. Reason can conquer many problems, but no one wants to live in a world bereft of joy—or even of less favorable emotions, like apprehension, confusion, dismay. Sometimes it feels good to feel bad, as the great poet Shirley Manson taught us.

As writers, we have the ability—and, perhaps, the responsibility—to help others tap into that reflex. There are few acts greater than to describe a feeling in terms so precise that it makes someone say, "Yes! That's it!"

Interference

Life interferes. Months ago I was almost done with the second draft of Mindfire, and hoping to get most of my planned revisions done in a couple of weeks.

"Oh ho ho," said life, adjusting its monocle and stroking its white Persian cat. And then it pressed a red button on its desk, and the floor opened up, dropping me into a pit of badly-coded PHP scripts.

But I battled my way through, and I'm making progress again. I'm almost done with the third draft, and unless my faithful beta readers manage to point out major problems, it'll be off to be published.

On another exciting note, I got feedback from a short story market, letting me know that one of my stories is in the running for publication; they'll let me know in, hopefully, a week or two. I'm fully going into this expecting to be rejected—less pain that way—but it is a validation that twice out of about a dozen attempts, I've gotten this far into the process. I honestly expected to get rejected dozens of times before getting any kind of traction at all.

So even if this latest attempt does fall through, I know that I'm at least capable of writing stories that are good enough to be seriously considered for publication by SFWA-membership-qualifying markets. It only takes a little faith that if I keep it up, eventually I'll write something that will strike a chord with the right editor at the right time... and then, I'll be the one wearing the monocle.

Obligatory Mad Men post

Mad Men is less about story than it is about character. Or rather, it's less obviously about story. The characters drive the action; sometimes Things Happen from external, unpredictable sources, but most of the conflict and tension and drama in the show stems from how the characters respond to things.

Don seeks that creative problem-solving place, because it makes him feel like he has an identity; Peggy wants to be treated like an equal, and wavers between obedient conformity and tough aggression; Pete wants, above all else, respect, and views events through the lens of how much he respect they gain or lose him.

In this season's premiere double-sized episode, we also learned a great deal about where Lane's psyche currently sits. His racist reaction to the black cab driver's offer to return the lost wallet stands in stark contrast to his rebellious pride at having a black girlfriend in season 4. His desire for sexual liberty, demonstrated by the aforementioned black girlfriend (and encouraged by Don when they had that night on the town, complete with hookers), has been suppressed in favor of reconciling with his wife, but Lane still held out a (slightly creepy) hope that the mysterious Delores might be interested in him.

It is hard writing characters of this depth and complexity, and any great writer should, it seems obvious, focus on the immensely difficult task of creating characters. Story and plotting are easy by comparison; great characters drive their stories.

Focusing on the Easy Stuff

What is the focus of most discussions about writing fantasy fiction?

Frankly, it's the easy stuff: historical details, magic systems, horses, swords, clothes, government. The stuff you can go read a couple of books about and get a perfectly good handle on, and because you read a couple of books about it, you're way ahead of most of the people reading the book you write as a result.

What's missing? Character. Story structure. Narrative flow. Building tension over a novel-length story.

There are very few discussions of these topics. It's not hard to see why; these are the difficult parts of writing, the elusive parts that are at the core of every great book ever written, and nobody who hasn't been pretty successful is going to be considered much of an authority on those topics.

Should we be trying to encourage more discussions about these kinds of topics? Is there any point? Will we get anything out of it, or would that time be better spent actually writing our own work? Is it even possible to discuss these things in any meaningful way without some sort of formal scholarly framework behind it?

Evolution

Four short story rejections and counting.

Nine months ago, when I started writing seriously, I had this vision that I would write my novel straight through, and then self-publish it. I figured I'd be done by the end of the year.

I was wrong. But I did learn a great many things along the way, including a lot about the worlds of e-publishing and self-publishing, and I ended up becoming motivated to start self-(e-)publishing short stories as a way to begin building a name for myself. It wasn't something I could have predicted, but it turns out to be an approach that, I think, works well for me.

It is, in fact, I think an ideal example of the four stages of competence. At first, I thought, "I'll write a novel! And it'll be great!" Not realizing, of course, that I had never written a novel before, and that there are a number of skills involved in it beyond the simple ability to put one word after another. This was the unconscious incompetence phase: I didn't recognize that I didn't know what I was doing.

I think now I'm in the conscious incompetence phase. I know that I don't know what I'm doing. And I'm doing my best to keep at it, hoping that some day I'll actually be reasonably good at this. That'll be the conscious competence phase, of course, followed, some day (I hope!) by the unconscious competence phase, where I am a master author and the world is my oyster. (Actually, I hate oysters. Why can't the world be my shrimp tempura roll?)

Knowing What You Want

Well now, it seems that I've gone and gotten an article published on Mythic Scribes! Check it out, and if you feel inspired, participate in the discussion!

Rejection

Two short story rejections and counting. Three more pending. Stephen King lost count of how many rejections he got before he finally sold a short story, but it was at least a hundred.

Although my primary concern is finishing my novel, Mindfire, it's difficult for me to monomaniacally focus on it when I have other unrelated ideas floating about in me 'ead. So I've been writing a number of short stories lately, in the 1k-3k word range—flash fiction seems to be quite popular these days, and a lot of paying markets are seeking stories in that length range (or even shorter!).

So I alternate between writing the novel and writing short stories. Some of these I'll post for free on the blog (such as The Destiny of Kajiyama Shen), some of these I'll self-publish (such as The Demons of Lashtë and Chalice and Knives), and others I will put through the rigors of submitting to paying markets.

It's this last that is the simplest approach, and yet the most difficult. For an unknown author, the editors of these markets (short fiction magazines and so on) have to really like the submission in order to publish it. Even if you do a lot of research—reading all the back issues to find out what kinds of things they publish, and tailoring stories for the individual market—a story that most folks would enjoy reading, if they had a chance to, might get rejected because that particular editor just didn't happen to get grabbed by it.

That doesn't mean it's not good enough to get published anywhere; maybe the twentieth market you submit the story to will accept it, and you'll never know unless you keep trying. Since the list of (e.g.) SWFA paying markets is both finite and relatively short (about 30 markets currently), it would be reasonable and feasible to submit a given story to every market on the list (or at least the appropriate ones; some only accept SF or fantasy, not both).

From a probability standpoint, having a lot of stories to submit helps, because prose fiction markets don't tolerate simultaneous submissions. Each story can only be submitted to one market at a time, and it might be weeks before you hear back. In the meantime, that story can't be submitted to anyone else. So if you write another one, you can be shopping that one around as well. Each story in the pipeline increases your chance of selling one.

Do the math: If each story has a (let's be generous) 1% chance of being accepted on each submission, and there's 30 paying markets, then a given story will have a (1 - 0.99³⁰) ~= 26% chance of being sold, if you were to submit it to all the markets. (For a given story, this might take a year or two, if each market takes a couple of weeks to respond.) Shop enough stories around to all the markets, and one of them might get sold.

You could get lucky and sell a story on your third or fourth submission. Or it might take hundreds, like Stephen King. The only thing you can do is not let yourself get discouraged, and keep at it: "Never give up. Never surrender."

Inspiration observed

I was at my son's school yesterday, helping build a garden. Shovel in hand, I was waiting to dig a hole when I realized that the conversation I was hearing out of the corner of my ear was very one-sided. It was pitched in a way that made me think it was someone talking on the phone, and when I glanced over, sure enough, there I saw a dad with his cellphone at his ear.

I looked away from this unremarkable occurrence, and then a moment later noticed that something had just changed in the tenor of his speech. I instinctively felt sympathy, and then realized that it was because I knew he had just been rejected in some way. Maybe he had offered to meet up with someone, and they said no. I tuned in a little better and replayed the overheard words in my head: "Oh. Okay. Well, maybe another time, then."

It probably wasn't a big deal, whatever it was, but I instinctively felt sorry for him. We all know how it is to make a suggestion that we'd like to see accepted, only to have it shot down. It's invariably an awful feeling.

But it was also a moment that I filed away, something that could be used in writing a scene, that particular shift in tone and posture and expression that someone makes when they get rejected in some way. I don't know if it'll come up soon, or at all, but it was an interesting exercise in writerly observation of the human condition, squirrelling away fragments of life for later incorporation into a narrative.

Elation

I did not expect instant success from publishing The Demons of Lashtë on Amazon. I know I'm a new author; it's going to take time, and a lot of relentless marketing, to get people exposed to my work. I'm confident that a lot of people will like it once they read it, but it's still a massive hurdle for me to get to the point where people are reading it.

Nonetheless, I had a very strong sense of elation and glee once I published the story. It was now a Real Thing that had Really Happened. And, unlike previous efforts in my life, I did not immediately decide that, having done this Real Thing, I was done. That was a good feeling. It let me know that I am really committed to the whole endeavor of writing as a career.

I've felt that I was, for a while; Mindfire, which is still in progress, I started last July, and I'm still working on it to this day, with no significant breaks (not counting Demons, which took a few days to write, edit, design the cover for, and publish). I've convinced myself I'm going to finish, and the end is in fact in sight; but the terrain between here and there is bumpy, and it's still going to be painful getting over it.

Building a career as a writer is hard no matter what. The traditional route involves a great deal of rejection, and not necessarily the promise of success; self-e-publishing means you can circumvent the gatekeepers, but then you get to do everything yourself—everything, including editing, design, publishing, marketing, and so on. It's a lot of work in either case. And I keep telling myself I'm going to succeed, because what other choice do I have?

Shorts, and a sample

While my novel-in-progress, Mindfire, is still my primary focus, something I'm going to start doing is producing short stories on a regular basis (scroll down for a sample), and making them available for sale on Amazon (for Kindle). There's three primary reasons for this:

Exposure

Getting my work out there in a professional format is going to be helpful in building up an audience. I'm really starting from square one, here; aside from a few people who've followed this blog, or followed me on Twitter (hi guys!), or are friends on Mythic Scribes, I haven't exactly got what you'd call an audience. The novel will be several more weeks until it's finished at least; but I can take a little time out here and there to produce polished short stories that, I think, people will like.

Practice writing

One thing strongly recommended by a lot of "new-to-writing" guides and articles is to write short stories on a regular basis. There's a few reasons for this: they're easier to finish than a novel; they give experience with constructing a complete story without getting bogged down in all the elaborate developments that occur in a longer story; they don't lock you in to a particular fictional world and make you spend a lot of time on world-building.

I will be immodest here and claim that I don't need practice writing prose; you can judge that for yourself below, where I've included a sample of the first story I'm going to publish, The Demons of Lashtë. I'm confident that I'm already good at that part. (Not that there's no room for improvement, but...) It's really the process that's important: completing something, publishing it, getting feedback.

Practice publishing

I've experimented with the Kindle Direct Publishing platform before. It's missing a lot of functionality I wish it had, and I hope that Amazon will improve that in the future; but there's more to publishing a short story than just throwing it onto Amazon.

• Creating cover art. I've been directed to a few good stock photo sites, where I can get good pics cheap, modify them and put title/author's name on them, and use those. They just need to look professional enough that people aren't turned off, and ideally are enticed by the cover.
• Formatting the doc. I use Linux, and I've already got a suite of tools I use for converting OpenOffice documents to Amazon's .mobi format. There's still a lot of little gotchas to watch out for, and I haven't done this enough to be completely confident in getting the files exactly right, but it seems to work so far.
• Marketing. That's right, the dreaded m-word. I have an instinctive aversion to marketing, as I majored in Computer Science and have been, professionally, a web programmer for the last twelve years. I always feel like that pimping my work will make people recoil and say, "How arrogant!" But I'm slowly learning that this is (mostly, I hope) not the case. So I just need to get over it.

So, without (much) further ado, here's a sample of the first few paragraphs of the first story I'll be publishing: The Demons of Lashtë. I will definitely be posting here when the full story is available on Amazon. :-)

Sample of The Demons of Lashtë

The demon struck, and Anders Vasik let the blade flash through him, cleaving armor, flesh, bone, sinew. The pain was staggering. But the demon-sword emerged out the other side, cleansed of blood, as the two sides of the wound melded together, trailing the blade’s passage. Anders’s spell left a bitter tang of sulphur in the air.

The strike left the demon unbalanced, and in that moment Anders held out his palm. A blinding pinprick of white fire tore through the demon’s gray hide, making a fist-sized hole ringed in char. The carbonized flesh swirled away on the wind, and the demon’s face twisted with every ounce of the minimal emotion it was capable of displaying. It fell back, tumbling into the jagged canyon, to be devoured by the enormous shale lizards that lurked below.

Anders collapsed onto all fours. The blade’s passage had taken more out of him than he’d expected, but he’d survived. That was all that mattered. He’d recover, he’d live to fight the next demon, and the next.

He looked up, and across the canyon, to where the city of Lashtë loomed, silent behind its walls of blackened stone. They’d shone, those walls, golden in the morning, silver at noon, ochre in the setting sun. But no longer. The erupting wrath of countless demons thrashing wildly to climb, to break through, blasted down by the city’s mages, had stained the walls permanently black. Only by a sacrifice of half their number had the mages created the chasm, buying the city some breathing room. Anders didn’t know if it had been worth it.

The horde was unending. This was no time for introspection. Anders whispered silent words to Umwë, and felt a warmth spread from his heart. Energized by golden fire, he stood again, and waited for the next demon to come.

A stone’s throw along the edge of the canyon, his friend Dródi stood, waiting as well. They’d gotten a respite, by whatever luck. “How are you feeling?” Dródi called. Beyond him was another shield-mage, and another, spaced along the canyon, disappearing beyond sight.

Anders shrugged. “Bored,” he called back. He estimated that it was another two turns before his shift would end. Then someone would relieve him, and he’d retreat to Lashtë, to rest and recreate. He looked forward most of all to seeing Gunnvar. They were as good as betrothed, although her father had not made the offer yet. But he knew it was coming.

A flicker of motion caught his eye. Another demon was coming. Anders brought up his hands, and began to summon fire.

Exploratory writing is fun and evil

When I'm first constructing a story, I have a general idea of where it will go, but the details are not initially nailed down. So I end up doing a lot of exploratory writing, where I improvise on the spur of the moment what the characters do, where they go, what kinds of things happen. This gives me ideas about how they can develop, what kinds of plot elements will occur, and so on.

The mistake I consistently make is to then assume that the exploratory elements generated by this process should remain in the final product, when what I really need to do is take the character progressions that I develop later, and apply them to the story elements to see if they make sense. If they don't, those elements need to be rewritten.

Last night I rewrote a chapter after realizing that the first half of it was totally unnecessary, and in fact nonsensical. Character K would never end up in location X; that would require character E to have made a decision that, in retrospect, makes no sense. (It seemed reasonable at the time, but I didn't spend more than five seconds coming up with it.) Now that I've done a bunch of other work, I have a much more thorough and developed understanding of the characters and story, and the plot element of K-at-X would never happen.

So I killed it. The last half of the chapter was rearranged and expanded a bit, but overall the chapter is now more than a thousand words shorter. Which is fine; there was quite a lot of irrelevant background detail and minor beats that really had no impact on K's story. Most of those beats were generated during the exploratory process, and so it makes sense that they just weren't important.

The lesson I'm hoping to internalize is that exploratory writing is fine -- it's fun to create scenes on the spur of the moment -- but it needs to be analyzed in detail at a later date, to determine if it actually makes sense. This can cause tectonic upheavals in the story, requiring a great deal of work, and to me this can be literally gut-wrenching.

(For a bit of fun detail: I first started work on this chapter on 2011 Aug 24. I finished the first draft of the chapter on Aug 29. From Nov 04 to Nov 07 I did an editing pass on it, which in retrospect was a waste of time; the core story elements had not been worked out properly as they have now.)

Breakthrough

Katin, Katin, Katin... I've just nailed down how she develops through the end of the novel. And in doing so, I realized something about how I wrote this novel, that I will hopefully rectify going forward:

I really, really enjoy writing prose. I do not, so much, enjoy structuring story and character development. It's difficult and painful, and I spend a lot of time feeling slightly nauseous and wondering how I'm going to get myself out of this jam. A lot of times, the way out means destroying what you've created and starting over. After doing that for the last couple of hours, I've gotten a solid sense of where the character of Katin should go, and how she should develop, and how her dramatic flaws should manifest.

The tricky part is, when tomorrow I reread the notes I wrote today, there's a chance that I will spot obvious glaring problems. Then I will feel nauseous again as I have to wade through figuring out, once more, exactly how Katin is going to progress as a character.

I spent a lot of the last six months writing prose and doing world-building. What I did not do nearly enough of was nailing down the characters. It can help to write an exploratory draft, to get some ideas about things that can happen; but nothing in there should be gospel. Break it apart, and save those ideas to reuse later somewhere that they fit. Meanwhile, go nail down the characters, who are (and should be) what drive the story.

I had a long phone call with a friend the other day. He's read the entire second draft of the novel, and he made a lot of very good points, a lot of which boiled down to me realizing that I hadn't really done my due diligence of nailing down the story and character progression. I kept telling myself the novel was pretty good as-is, which is probably the case (people seem to like my prose), but good prose doesn't make a good story.

And that brings me to another danger of, specifically, handing out sample chapters to people: A sample chapter does not contain enough material for people to judge your character and story skills, only your prose. I've posted versions of chapter 2 and chapter 5 on Mythic Scribes, and in both cases everyone has praised the prose, but looking at the story as a whole, there's a lot more work to be done. At least at this point, I'm confident that my writing is an easy read, even if it doesn't quite add up to what it should.

Reintegration and Details

I finished the second draft. Now I'm working on the prologue and first four chapters again, integrating some backstory changes and trying to make sure other details are present.

This is a pain in the ass.

Scattered across these five chapters are various pieces of information, some of which are important, some of which turn out not to be so. I put them in early on, thinking they'd be relevant later, but that's not how it turned out. And while interesting world details are, er, interesting, if they don't inform the story, they can actually harm it by being present.

The barbaric tribal nation to the north is something I find interesting, but it doesn't actually come up much during the story, and so it's a bad idea to present details about that nation that are not relevant to the plot or the characters. It's just distracting. Readers will think it's important, and it never turns out to be important, and it's not clearly part of a scene-setting.

For example, a character arrives in a new city, and is passing through an open-air market. You have a scene like this (off the top of my head):

Ralyn gazed out across the bazaar. She saw shaven-headed Irtoks, in their polished black mail; there was a trio of Grendul, arguing fiercely and slapping each other on the chests. Vendors kept their heads down whenever a Thorn Caller passed by, singing his terrible dirge.

Irtoks, Grendul, and Thorn Callers don't ever need to come up again in the story, because this is just giving a sense of the place where Ralyn (who is presumably a main character) currently is.

Compare with this passage:

Ralyn listened to the lords debating. They spoke of the Ashkadar, the barbarians in the northern mountains, and whether they might try to invade the green lands to the south again. Ashkadar were fierce fighters; growing up in a frozen wasteland meant only the strongest survived.

Unless these "Ashkadar" show up later, that last sentence is irrelevant padding. Ralyn is not in the frozen north, she is not going to run into any Ashkadar. Even if she knows this detail about the Ashkadar, relating it to the reader is not really a good idea.

Yes, there are some readers who don't mind plowing through loads of extra, irrelevant details, because they're fascinated by the details per se. But it doesn't make for a stronger story. And it's not the way I want to write. And yet I find myself writing that way a lot, because I'm pretty much making it all up as I go along. An interesting detail will occur to me, and I'll just put it in on the fly.

The hard part isn't recognizing these irrelevant details later on; the hard part is making myself delete them.

Another problem is being too vague about important details. I tend to be too oblique; I don't like stating facts outright, even if important. I prefer to integrate them organically.  But what happens is that the details end up sounding like elaborations on things that were stated earlier. The reader ends up thinking "Did I miss something?"

The hardest part about all this is keeping track of which details are where. Did I mention and reinforce the idea that Ashkadar raiders are incredibly fierce and brutal? Mentioning it once in chapter 1, when the raiders don't show up until chapter 15, means that some readers will have completely forgotten that detail by the time the Ashkadar show up.

But at the same time, overdoing it is a problem. Readers will notice, and say, "Geez, we get it, the Ashkadar are fierce warriors."

(This isn't even a "show, don't tell" problem. If the characters have heard all their lives that the Ashkadar are fierce, then having the characters think about how fierce the Ashkadar are is fine, as long as it gets shown at some point.)

Elves have left the building

The novel I'm writing doesn't feature any sentient races besides humans. Nonetheless, I have future plans for a series that would involve demi-human races like elves and dwarves.

So on Mythic Scribes lately, there's been discussion of elves in particular and how to make them "unique" or "different." Reading through that thread, it occurred to me: Do we have to make elves unique and different?

It's all too common to see an author accused of using "generic" races that have the same characteristics as the ones Tolkien laid out half a century ago. Dwarves are short, broad, and hairy; they love gold, live underground, etc. Elves are tall, fair, slim, graceful, reclusive, live a very long time, etc. But so what? They're good tropes, and I don't think there's a problem with using them more or less as-is. Obviously other authors' elves need to have a different history, and different realms/names. But if the characters you create are interesting and have personality, then why is it a problem for them to be "stock" elves?

Creating a fictional human culture based on e.g. medieval England would never receive the same kind of disdain that using Tolkien-standard elves does. Why is it a problem to use Tolkien-standard elves, but not use Tolkien-standard humans? Is it critical that a fantasy world be a completely original setting? Are there any major permutations of the possible attributes elves can have that haven't been written in the decades since Lord of the Rings was published? You could give them all sorts of attributes that would make them into something that nobody would call an "elf," I suppose -- give them scaly skin, make them short-lived, ugly, etc.

Is it better to avoid using the word "elf" altogether and just come up with another, more "original" race? There's really only so many variations on sentient races that you can do, and I'm sure they've all pretty much been done by now. Humanoid races based on animals (wolf-men! cat-people!), vegetables (sentient trees! fungus men!), or minerals (rock golems! crystalline... things!). Humanoid races with various exaggerated characteristics (very short, very tall, very thin, very fat). Undead races, etc. Good luck thinking of a characteristic that's never been used before.

And even if you do, so what? It still has to fit into a good story, with good characters. Perhaps too much time is spent on worrying about the details of fantasy worlds, and not enough on the details of character and story. Maybe because it's easier to do so. I'm starting to think that when I get to the point of writing the novels that have elves and dwarves, I'm deliberately going to use Tolkien-standard races.

How do you know when it's good?

How do you know when your work is good enough to publish?

It depends on your goals. Is your goal to be a published author, making a living at writing? Then you only need your writing to be good enough to get published, and to convince people who read it to pay you to write more.

That's my goal. My main goal. It would be nice to be a world-renowned author with lots of awards and attention, but I think that happens more by luck than even by hard work. Someone with the talent and skill and marketing sense and who can put in a colossal amount of hard work... still might not become world-famous. But as long as you keep writing, you've got a chance.

That's why my main goal is to get paid for writing. Because if I can get paid for writing, I can give up my day job, and then I can spend all the time I would have been programming, writing. And then I'll be writing 8-10 hours a day, instead of the 1-2 I have time for right now.

But to get paid for writing, you have to be able to write stuff people will pay you for. And you have to know if it's good enough before you send it off to be read, because if it's not good enough, your work will get rejected and ignored.

So when I ask, "How do you know when it's good?" what I'm really asking is, "How do you know when it's good enough that someone will buy it?" This isn't a hard and fast line; consider short story A, which would be bought for print by 5% of the potential buyers, versus story B, which would be bought for print by 30% of the potential buyers. Is it good enough? That depends on whether you can find someone in the set of buyers who will buy your work.

One indicator that it's good enough, or almost good enough, is that an editor or agent shows interest in it -- or if someone actually buys it. Then you know that professionals in the field consider it [almost] good enough. With a little more work, a little more practice, maybe it finally will be good enough.

The only thing you can accurately say about a work that hasn't sold is that it hasn't sold yet. Maybe it won't ever sell; maybe you just haven't found the right buyer yet. When it does sell, then you've got proof that you can write something sellable; but that doesn't mean you can do it again.

But if you're a writer, you'll sure as hell keep trying. I know I will. I will write until the day I die.